One of the interesting announcements that seemed to get lost in the flood of Silverlight news from Mix08 was a further information about future improvements to WPF. In his keynote talk Scott Guthrie re-iterated many of the things he'd detailed previously in the 3.5 client road-map. One slightly new bit of information was the opening up of BitmapEffects to people outside Microsoft. Not only that, you will be able to write hardware accelerated BitmapEffects! This means that DropShadow, Glow and Blur (some of the built-in effects) which are currently software rendered, and if used inadvisably can have nasty performance impacts will also be hardware accelerated.

During the keynote we were treated to a number of effects including ripple (see below) and fish-eye magnification.